Okay. This is the big Eclipse post.

Ten Things About Eclipse has covered the bases.

Yesterday, my piece about The Decline and Fall of the Twilight Empire went up at Tor.com. There, I discussed the fact that as the fandom grows, the quality of actual filmmaking seems to sink like a stone.

(I will be honest, though, looking at my notes for New Moon, I’m not sure if endless music-video tracking shots are any worse than establishing shots with voiceover that then cut to a different location/scene entirely. Still, Eclipse had more to work with and did less with it, so it’s probably still the worst movie of the three. I’ll have to think about this.)

But first, as always, there was The Line.

The line for Eclipse was, in many ways, the smoothest this operation has been run.

Theatres are now aware of what can happen if you keep the long lines bunched up together for hours (STAMPEDE), and this was one of the multiplexes big enough to have it showing on at least seven screens, so they did what any smart theatre would do: they lined up everyone outside by theatre, three deep across the sidewalk, and wound around a city block by 9:30pm, when we did a fly-by and immediately ran away.

The good news is, unlike the first year I went there and it was the fucking Mines of Moria, there were actual plans in place. As soon as the final showing of that theatre’s normal movie was over, they let that theatre in. It was a foolproof plan to minimize crowds, normalize lines at concessions, and make this a smooth operation.

Then they turned off the air conditioning. Let me tell you, when they turn off the air conditioning in a two-story movie theatre full of pining women, it is not pretty.

Also not pretty: the Team Edward/Team Jacob fighting, which reached a fever pitch in our theatre, and proved that keeping everyone penned together outside would probably have led to a battle royale. (Have you ever seen the poster for The Warriors? It was like that.)

Apparently the thing to do this year was to wear an Eclipse Burger King crown with the image of your favorite dude on the front. I counted at least fifty in our theatre alone.

(Bella was also on the crown; no one ever, ever had her in front.)

Two girls had a fight just outside the bathrooms, with one pointing accusingly at the other’s crown: “Of COURSE Edward is the best for her! How can you be Team Jacob? I THOUGHT YOU WERE MY FRIEND.”

Teenagers: holy crap.

At one point on the way inside, two girls had a Team Edward/Jacob sing-off to “The Boy is Mine,” pointing to their crowns. They seemed to be friends, so it wasn’t particularly invested, and they sort of wandered past the theatre employee, who looked after them for a second, sighed, and said, “Just…what the shit.”

I still think the line winner was the girl in a Cullen crest shirt, looking very displeased with her friends: “I was here early IRONICALLY.”

These kids speak for all of us.

And then it was time for the movie. Oh, was it ever.

The movie was truly awful, but there were glimpses that perhaps, at some early stage of preproduction, it had tried to be more. The opening scene – a human guy named Riley getting hunted down and bitten by Victoria – was like that. Sure, it looks like the opening to an episode of Pacific Northwest Vice, but it was something different, and suggested that this movie was going to try to be compelling.

Then we cut to Bella and Edward doing homework in a meadow. Must Edward and Bella ruin everything? (Yes.)

Also, he doesn’t even let her do homework, which – look, dude, it’s your own business if you want to spend your immortal years repeating high school in an endless cycle that would haunt the nightmares of any normal person who has been to high school just the one time, but some of us are just trying to pass Affectless Poetry Reading 102, okay?

Also, the less these two actors like each other, the more kissing they have to do. This movie is nonstop suckface. And it was not the fun kind.

Anyway, this movie has some continuity, and it turns out that Bella has to be home early since she’s grounded. She’s apparently been grounded ever since she ran off to Italy without leaving a note (“Dear Dad, Going to Italy to visit the vampire bureaucracy and file for a mortality extension. See you soon, Bella.”), but her dad offers to waive her grounding if she will hang out with someone, anyone, who is not Edward.

We hear you, Dad.

Two things here.

1. Billy Burke just shines in all these movies. I want him to do a John Sayles movie soon.

2. They LITERALLY PASTED HER FACE ON THIS PRODUCTION SHOT. This is how lazy this entire movie is. It is LITERALLY PASTED ON.

When I say this is the worst movie, I don’t mean the plot is the worst, or even that the pacing is the worst. I am saying that it is the most careless, shoddy movie of the three, and this picture is Exhibit A.

Anyway, her voiceover tells us that she’d like to go see Jacob, because her human friends are apparently not worthy of her time ever since Jessica questioned Bella’s instinct to ride off with a random biker in an attempt to make the ghost of her boyfriend show up to scold her.

(Wow, the “which is worse” race is gonna be tiiiiight.)

Jacob, however, is not answering her phone calls. She begins to worry about their friendship, because if he’s not her friend any more than who will worship her on really sunny days?, so she climbs in her car to go see him, but her car won’t start, because it’s old, and also because Edward took car parts out so she couldn’t go anywhere, because he’s decided it’s not a good idea for her to go see her friend.

MIKE SPEAKS FOR ALL OF US.

Meanwhile, in a completely different movie, that dude Riley is raising a vampire army that is so overcome with bloodlust that they have to light cars on fire.

We are supposed to spend the movie sitting around and wondering who could be behind such a nefarious plan, but this movie is not very good with the suspense, so it’s this one:

That’s supposed to be Victoria. In the first two movies she was sort of great, but they decided to replace her for this movie, for reasons I will never understand in my whole life, since Bryce Dallas Howard looks incredibly uncomfortable every moment she’s onscreen, as if she signed up for it because she thought this was The Eclipse, the Ciaran Hinds movie, and then was just too polite to say anything about it.

Luckily, we don’t see her much. In fact, we don’t see anybody much, and here’s why:

(This little tyke’s going to sell a million copies!)

These are the factions who get screen time. The movie is only two hours long, and Bella and Edward (or Bella and Jacob) are sucking face for at least a third of it. There’s just not enough time for any of these people to have more than one line, which is for the best, since most of them can’t act.

You know who really tries, though?

Taylor Lautner. He acts just as hard as he possibly, possibly can. When Bella comes over to see him, it’s like:

Jacob: Why CAN’T you UNDERSTAND that I am in LOVE with you?
Bella: *files nails*

To be fair, this movie seems to indicate that people only ever pay attention to Jacob when he’s shirtless, so maybe this scene is just the cinema equivalent of that intelligence test where you put a chew toy under a blanket and see how long it takes your dog to realize what happened.

He is the last of the werewolf guys to realize this; the others, as you have seen, shirk shirts entirely – except Leah Clearwater, who is a werewolf, but because she is a girl she has to wear a shirt, and because she is not a supportive girlfriend she is not allowed to be in the group shot.

This is her, though. She doesn’t like Bella, because the last time Victoria came looking for Bella, Victoria killed Leah’s dad. Everyone in the entire wolf pack is like, “Don’t worry about her, she’s just PMSing, amirite?” because everyone knows how annoying it is when a girl gets all snappish just because her father died.

Jacob is not happy that Bella is planning to become a vampire, because he doesn’t want the Cullens to protect her (as her in-laws) because it’s not safe (outside his shirtless embrace) and vampires can’t be trusted (to not-not have marbly sex with you). He insists she has feelings for him that she just can’t admit, and says that he’d rather see her dead than married to Edward.

…FOR ALL OF US.

The werewolves are apparently also aware that vampires are running around wreaking havoc on the sedans of the Pacific Northwest, and they invite Bella over to listen to some secret tribal legends about how women who sacrifice themselves for their werewolf boyfriends are the best, and this is definitely a solid life plan.

(Just out of frame, the girl who got her face ripped up by her boyfriend that one time raises her hand, and is promptly shushed.)

Edward lies to her that there’s no trouble, and when she finds out she is furious and then forgives him immediately, which is a theme that repeats so often in this movie that I cannot even remember them all. I just remember being appalled for two hours nonstop.

The wolves and the Cullens decide to strike a bargain to work together to fight off the vampires when they appear, which is apparently like three weeks from now, because they have time to stage training sessions in the woods with the Cullens.

Since the last movie, all the Cullens changed their hair. Carlisle also changed his accent (he’s using Madonna’s British one from 2005). He’s not the only one, though; halfway through a flashback to his time in the Confederacy, Jackson Rathbone picks up a drawl that he decides not to put down, so for the last third of the movie it’s like he’s looping Val Kilmer in Tombstone.

The vampires show the werewolves how to kill vampires (a bold strategy that seems essentially flawed, CULLENS), and everyone tries to get along, except that Jacob still super-hates Edward. The next time Edward drops her off with Jacob (because the vampires have to hunt, or because of scent something something, or because it’s the odd-numbered weekends – she gets passed around a lot), Jacob double-super-insists she has feelings for him, and grabs her and kisses her to prove it, and doesn’t let up until she punches him.

[Mikespeaksforallofus.]

I will say this: when they return home in the book, her dad hears that Jacob kissed her against her will and high-fives Jacob, which is pretty much the worst thing I have heard from these books, which is saying something. In the movie, when Edward is waiting to beat the crap out of Jacob and her dad comes out to break it up, Jacob says he kissed Bella, and Bella’s dad gives everyone a look like he cannot imagine how all of these worthless people entered his daughter’s life. Upgrade.

At some point in all this, Charlie tries to talk about the birds and the bees with Bella, and it’s actually hilarious. Oh, Billy Burke, we know you did all you could.

And that speech isn’t a moment too soon, because since Jacob can’t be trusted not to be a molester, it’s back to Edward to protect Bella every moment of every day for the rest of her life. This means they will be at Edward’s house, Home Alone, and Bella gets really nervous about that, like their entire subplot is not based on the fact that Bella wants to do the sparkly nasty with him, and he is always recoiling and muttering that he can’t possibly, because he might kill her with the force of his love.

(GIRL, JUST GET OUT OF TOWN AND GO TO COLLEGE, I AM BEGGING YOU.)

So she goes to his house (where he has cleared out the Bombay Company to get a bed installed in his room), and blackmails him into sex by promising she’ll marry him if he does.

They get this far, and then he shoots her down and crabbily buttons his shirt back up, and then proposes to make her honor her promise, and she agrees, even though she says she’s too young to get married (for like the third time), and he says he’ll wait, and then she says he shouldn’t wait, because she’d marry him sooner if only he’d make her a vampire so she won’t get any older and turn ugly.

Everyone in this movie needs a hobby.

As the battle approaches, they remove Bella from the action by taking her to a mountaintop, where she almost freezes to death because Edward has no body heat, and also they are at a high altitude covered with snow, which Edward is surprised to find is very cold. (Edward went to high school like twenty times. I just want to remind you.)

Jacob comes in to warm her against his shirtless torso, and then he and Edward talk to each other about which one of them she’ll pick, and if they could ever have gotten along, and if you like-me-like-me then please check this box. This is mildly engaging, mostly because Bella is not talking.

Then in the morning Jacob goes to join the fight. Bella doesn’t want him to, so she kisses him, but then he goes off to fight anyway, and Edward is not even mad that she kissed Jacob, because apparently a girl is never able to decide when she wants to have sex, unless she is deciding she wants to have sex with someone else, in which case that is something she can decide. (I just report the news.)

Then there is a battle, which is badly filmed, and also shows you that newborn vampires are made of fiberglass which it is then easy to set on fire. The more you know.

Meanwhile, the real battle is going down up on the mountaintop, because Victoria and that guy Riley we all care so much about have found Edward’s hiding place and are out to get him!

This is what the fight scene actually looks like. I do not even know what to tell you.

Naturally, Bella stabs herself so that the smell of her blood will distract everyone, and so Edward gains victory. Meanwhile, back at the main battle, Leah Clearwater fucks up and Jacob nearly gets killed saving her, and the Volturi show up just to remind people that they exist and are scary enough to kill the leftover extra, and then the battle is over.

Luckily, Bella agrees to marry Edward (for like the fifth time in this movie alone), and then everything is fine, because Jacob is too busy with having all his ribs broken to run after her and demand she have more feelings for him, and then Edward and Bella run off into the meadow to make out and prepare to tell Charlie they’re engaged.

Because that’s a scene I’d actually like to see, the movie is suddenly over.

That means there’s nothing left to do but look forward to the first half of Breaking Dawn, which is nothing but large standoffs between factions who do nothing, and suckface.

And for once, these two speak for all of us.